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By Root 1396 0

the hill, more from down below, on the flat ground. He couldn’t keep the shivers away, tried to answer that, you’re not dying, it’s just a small wound. Get control of yourself. The enemy is right up there! He slid the gun up the slope, realized it was empty, felt a new panic, one hand fumbling against the cartridge belt. But the shaking in his hands was too much, the shaking now in his brain, pulling him to some other place, warm and dry. The ground beneath him was different now, soft, like a bed, holding him, someplace safe. He stayed with the feeling for a long moment, but something brought him back, a hard crack, a gunshot, startling, dangerous. He tried to fight the dream, gripped the rifle, stared into the darkness. Stop this! Stay awake! But it wasn’t sleep, his eyes wide, alert. His heart began to race, the pain and the wetness returning. He thought of Welty, needed help from his friend. From what? What’s happening to me? The dream came again, angry this time, and he wanted to shout, the anger rolling over into horror, pieces of bodies, faces, Ferucci, laughing at him, more laughter, his own, sharing the joke, a deep echo inside his brain. The laughter was louder, unstoppable, and he felt a hard claw wrapped around him, pulling him out of the mud, carrying him away. The darkness gave way to more images, faces, men he didn’t know, some just pieces, all of them laughing, his brain erupting with too many images, the claw suddenly letting go, dropping him into a great black hole, a surging river of blood and filth and madness.

The assaults on Sugar Loaf Hill had been many and futile, and after each failure to drive the Japanese away, the number of Marine casualties grew to a staggering percentage of each unit engaged. Using darkness as the only protection they had, the platoons who still had their lieutenants, or squads that could depend on a sergeant, obeyed the orders that trickled up the hill from runners and the occasional walkie-talkie: withdraw. In the daylight, from the distant hills to the north, American observers could see the Japanese swarming back out into their positions, positions the Marines had no choice but to abandon. Offshore, the enormous battleship the USS Mississippi used its massive guns to pour a horrific dose of fire onto the Japanese positions, not only on the south slope of Sugar Loaf, but on the other two hills that spread out behind, as much as the navy could do to obliterate all three corners of the triangle. The cost to the Japanese was horrific, but, as always, their greatest number had scrambled back down into the deepest caves, which protected them from even the heaviest artillery.

The Marines who could make the withdrawal did so, but many of the wounded could not yet be evacuated, and so the American artillery unwittingly did what the doctors could not: erased their suffering. On the open ground of the hill itself, the bodies of men from both sides could be seen by the observers, and by the men who gathered out beyond the base of the hill, preparing for yet another frontal assault. Though the Marines did all they could to obey their passionate duty to leave no man behind, the bodies of the dead were spread throughout pockets of dead Japanese, a scattered mass of rotting decay, the ongoing fights not allowing either side to offer rescue or assistance to so many of their fallen.

The fight on Sugar Loaf Hill continued for nearly a full week, with much the same result: conquest and withdrawal, all the while increasing the astounding casualty counts on both sides. By May 20, the vicious pounding from American artillery had silenced most of the heavy Japanese guns that had directed fire from Half Moon and Horseshoe, the other two hills. Finally, waves of American tanks swung southward, circling behind the hills themselves, trying to pierce through supply lines to the Japanese on Sugar Loaf and adding their firepower to the struggle that would soon follow on the base of the arrowhead. Pockets of Japanese troops still occupied many of the caves, but the tanks brought a new weapon to the